Author: Helen

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. These are articles we’ve read and liked, things that made us think and things we couldn’t stop talking about.

Lorraine Estelle of COUNTER, Stuart Maxwell of Scholarly IQ, and Iris Hanney of Unlimited Priorities discuss COUNTER credentialing and how the COUNTER standards allow libraries and publishers to assess value in the Authority File podcast. There’s also a fascinating insight into how COUNTER came into being.

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. These are articles we’ve read and liked, things that made us think and things we couldn’t stop talking about.

A new paper by Nir Grinberg identifies five types of reading behaviors: “Scan,” “Read,” “Read (long),” “Idle,” and “Shallow” and how they vary across different types of articles, sites, and mobile and nonmobile devices. At some point we’ll have a go at applying this to our articles to see if it matches our expectations.

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. These are articles we’ve read and liked, things that made us think and things we couldn’t stop talking about. It’s an eclectic mix this week:

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. These are articles we’ve read and liked, things that made us think and things we couldn’t stop talking about.

I guess we wouldn’t let the week go by without mentioning GDPR. Digiday write about GDPR may change Facebook and advertising:

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. These are articles we’ve read and liked, things that made us think and things we couldn’t stop talking about.

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. These are articles we’ve read and liked, things that made us think and things we couldn’t stop talking about. Check back every Friday for a new post.

A digital answer to an old question
The Economist’s quizzes on Instagram drive readers to their website at the same rate as Facebook posts. (Impressive considering they have nearly six times as many followers on Facebook).

How do people feel about news selected by algorithms on social media?“Based on focus group and online survey data from four countries (UK, USA, Germany, and Spain) they find that “the majority do not understand exactly how the information they receive is filtered by algorithms, but they do not uncritically accept it either, because they are sceptical of all forms of selection ‒ including that performed by editors and journalists”.

Inside a Local Newspaper’s Fight to Survive
Bloomberg Technology’s Jeremy Kahn visits the Echo’s newsroom, which has been experimenting with computer-generated stories produced by a project funded by Google. The technology’s helping the paper’s editors serve its readers with fewer journalists. But will automation ultimately end up taking even more jobs?

Welcome to Things we read this week, a weekly post featuring articles from around the internet recommended by BMJ’s Digital Group members. These are articles we’ve read and liked, things that made us think and things we couldn’t stop talking about. Check back every Friday for a new post.

Research Workflows
Investing in researcher workflow tools is an obvious next step for publishers seeking to increase revenues. It’s not hard to imagine, as Roger C. Schonfeld does, a future world in which Institutions drift into buying bundles of products and services alongside their institutional subscriptions. I think it’s more useful to follow Hax’s Delta model (see below) and think of these as total customer solutions strategies rather than lock-in strategies. A bundle which includes journal subscriptions, a research evaluation tool, an institutional repository and a reference management tool thrown in for free is likely to be cheaper and more efficient than purchasing and running all of those products from different vendors. Although this is likely to lead to lock-in/competitor lock-out.Not sure what Researcher Workflows are? Terry Clague also has a useful post trying to define the term “researcher workflow”. LabWorm’s roundup of the Top 17 trending research tools/sites of 2017 that were most appreciated and used by the LabWorm community is an interesting insight into what researchers are actually using. (H/T: @pluto_network). Not on LabWorm’s list is ContentMine which claims to provide tools for getting papers from many online sources, normalising them, then processing them to lookup and/or search for key terms, phrases, patterns, statements, and more – something to try next week.

Just before we head into 2018 here’s a look back at what’s been happening on Pubtechgator this year. Here are the top ten most read stories for 2017, covering various topics including the impact of the ‘digital duopoly’ hoovering up 60% of global digital ad market, a new cryptocurrency for investigative journalism, changes at PLOS, augmented reality, automated journalism, chatbots and a smartwatch that uses your body heat to charge. Continue reading “2017 in review: Pubtechgator’s most read stories”→

Inspired by Ian Mulvany’s tweet about Vega Academic Publishing System (which does look interesting, especially the partnership with Oslo School of Architecture and Design). We thought we would publish the list of publishing platforms that we keep an eye on. The list is a bit of a jumble and includes a number of platforms like Aletheia, PubPub and Authorea aimed at authors who want to self-publish. Publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and John Wiley who run their own platforms but don’t open them up to other publishers aren’t listed. If we’ve got something wrong or you want to add a platform please let us know via the comments. Continue reading “An A-Z list of scholarly publishing platforms (Updated 16 April 2018)”→